Page 7 of After All

I don’t want to look to see who touched me, but I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll regret it forever — or at least a really long time. Lifting my head, my eyes fix on a denim-clad crotch. I tilt my head further up, and when my gaze locks onto his, I understand in an instant what my clients and patients mean when they say they believe in an instant connection.

Chemistry.

His baby blue eyes peer down at me. I swear the man could stare a hole straight through me, his gaze is so intense. And then he speaks.

“Excuse me. I think you’ve got my chair.”

Complete and utter silence. That’s all the man gets in return from me. Me, a PhD recipient. A summa cum laude graduate of Brown University and the Harvard School of Medicine. A published author of no less than fourteen articles in the Journal of American Medicine.

Nothing.

He smiles and lifts his hand from my shoulder. I whimper — actually whimper — from the loss of his touch and nearly fall out of my chair when it registers.

Confirmed. I need a medical evaluation immediately. Possibly a three-day psych hold. What the hell is my body doing right now?

“It’s okay,” he goes on to say as if I haven’t sat silently for the last thirty seconds. “This one beside you is empty. You seem comfortable there. I don’t mind sharing my favorite spot.”

“O-okay.”

In my abject nerdiness, I inspect the chair where I sit and see nothing different about it from the other chairs that surround it. Before I can make a comment about it – because apparently that feels important to say – he speaks again.

“Sorry, I don’t think I caught your name.”

Suzette plops down in the seat on the other side of me. My relieved exhale matches the puff of air from the cushion of her chair. I can’t remember a moment that I’ve ever been so grateful for her friendship, and that’s saying something. I rely on her in far too many social settings than I care to admit.

“Hi, I’m Suzette,” she says, reaching her hand across me towards the mystery man whose touch didn’t send me into sensory overload.

“Carter. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Do you know Amelie?” she asks him, her eyes flicking back and forth between me and the man sitting beside me.

Very closely beside me.

A smile stretches across his face so slowly that it grows sort of like a flower. You can’t see the progress, but once it blooms, the beauty takes your breath away. “Not exactly. We hadn’t gotten to names yet.”

He extends his hand towards me. “Carter Ortiz. It’s really nice to meet you.”

Suzette reaches towards his hand. “Oh, no. Amelie doesn’t really?—”

Refusing to let a chance to see if my response to him minutes ago was an anomaly, my hand shoots out like a lightning strike and lands in his, palm-to-palm, before my brain even knows what it’s doing. “Amelie Evans.”

A gasp from behind me sucks nearly all the air out of the room, and when I turn to Suzette and drop Carter’s hand, my eyes are wide and full of disbelief. Hers mirror mine, and her mouth hangs slightly agape from surprise.

“What were you saying, Suzette?” Carter’s brow furrows, and his head tilts to the side in question.

“I, um, well…”

I inherently know – somehow – it’s imperative that I say more to this man than my name, so I pick up where she left off. “She was trying to help. I’m not great in social situations, and I don’t like to touch people I don’t know. And I don’t particularly care to be touched, sometimes even by people with whom I’m well acquainted.”

I hold his gaze, waiting for the look that betrays how strange he thinks I am. Twenty seconds pass, then thirty, but his expression never changes.

“I get it. We all have things we like and don’t like, right?”

He shrugs like it’s no big deal. Like there isn’t anything wrong with me. Which, by all accounts, there isn’t. But I’ve had such little luck convincing people of that over the years, it surprises me.

In a good way.

“Yes. Yes, we do.”

---